Monday, September 19, 2011

Our trip to Walton's Mountain aka Schuyler, VA

I wrote this travel piece after our trip this past summer to Schuyler, Virginia, to celebrate my wife's birthday. It ran Sunday in The Dallas Morning News. It's behind a pay wall, so here it is in full. The DMN web site also has about 15 of my photos; see them here. Enjoy.

SCHUYLER, Va. — Fiction collides with fact for fans of television’s The Waltons amid a gentle feud in this tiny community deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains foothills.

An escaped sheep bleats from the middle of rural Rockfish River Road as we pull up to the Walton’s Mountain Country Store in search of the holy grail: series creator Earl Hamner’s childhood home, a two-story restored testament to the enduring power of John-Boy, Mary Ellen, Mama and Daddy, Grandpa and Grandma and all the kids.

The show is a nostalgic touchstone of an iconic and dirt-poor Depression-era Southern family of fantasy that was very much based on the true-life Hamner clan.

For $10 cash a person or $8 each for two or more, store owner Dave Pounds hands over a key so we can tour the boyhood home next door, which a local owner refurbished and opened to the public in 2010. Six steps lead up to the white wooden home, which is smaller than in the show but of the same austere style. The long kitchen table topped with a fake Bundt cake awaits a family supper, while upstairs in Hamner’s/John-Boy’s room a pair of spectacles rests next to a quill pen on a desk by the window.

Hamner’s novel Spencer’s Mountain was published in 1961 and spawned a film of the same name. The Homecoming, his 1970 novel also loosely based on Hamner’s family, was made into a television movie and spawned The Waltons, which ran on television from 1972-81.

“The average Waltons fan walking through the door has a very personal relationship to either the program or a cast member,” Pounds says.

Entering the door are Junior and Suzi Wiant of West Virginia. She’s a homemaker, and he’s a coal miner. A coal mine depicted in the television show was inspired by the Alberene soapstone quarry that was once the heart of Schuyler. The Wiants count the cantankerous grandmother as their favorite Walton.

“I just love that old woman,” Suzi Wiant says with a wide grin. “She’s so outspoken.”
The Wiants have already been down the road to the Walton’s Mountain Museum, which was once the town’s school. Hamner graduated from high school there in 1940. It was later an elementary and opened as a museum and community center in 1992 with the full support of Hamner.

Inside is a more elaborate re-creation of John-Boy’s room, the family kitchen, Ike Godsey’s store and the still used to make the Baldwin sisters’ “recipe” (moonshine). The Baldwins were inspired by real-life mother-and-daughter moonshiners in a nearby town.

The $7 admission fee buys access to a brief video about the making of the show, a look at town photos and Waltons collectibles, including miniature reproductions of the Waltons home and fan-painted pictures of the cast.

But Hamner’s early support for the museum has waned. In his 2006 memoir Generous Women, Hamner writes, “Unfortunately, because of an injury done to a member of my family, I no longer support the museum and am in no way associated with it.”

When actress Mary McDonough — Erin Walton on the show — tub-thumped her memoir Lessons From the Mountain in May, she did it at the store, which also sells signed copies of Hamner’s books.

Pounds five years ago took over operation of the store in what was once a shed where a teenage Hamner wrote. But he says of the museum, “They hate me. They absolutely hate me.”

Roberts puts the museum’s attitude toward the store bluntly: “We were here first. They were supposed to be a bed-and-breakfast, and they’re not from here.”

Indeed, the Walton’s Mountain Country Store lists itself as a bed-and-breakfast perfect for the ultimate Waltons fan, but my repeated calls and emails seeking a reservation for my wife’s birthday were unanswered.

Instead, we stayed two miles away at the White Pig, a B&B and animal sanctuary that takes its name from the first of the owner’s assortment of rescued potbellied pigs, which join a former racehorse and a gentle pony on a beautiful 170-acre spread. The breakfast is vegan, and guests are asked not to eat meat on the premises during their stays.

Confession: We drove into Schuyler from Richmond without having eaten dinner, and our only option was Ike’s, a combo convenience store and fast-food joint on the spot that once housed the inspiration for the television show’s Ike Godsey’s General Store. The grill was closed, but they gifted me with a few delicious last pieces of fried chicken. I guiltily stowed the bones in our rental car’s trunk rather than sully the White Pig with my carnivorous ways.

Photos are life

EVACUATION PLAN's Fan Box

About Me

My articles and essays have appeared in Texas Monthly, Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Morning News, Austin Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News, Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine and Variety. My novel Evacuation Plan is about life/death in a residential hospice and is inspired by time spent observing an actual hospice. My photographs have appeared widely in print and in Texas shows. I'm a member of the Elephant Gun photo collective. In my spare time, ahem, I also teach writing to graduate students at St. Edward's University and to undergrads at Austin Community College.

What they're saying about EVACUATION PLAN

"Tales alternately gentle, dramatic, surrealistic, that collectively affirm the beauty of being alive, even as they acknowledge that all of us face the necessity of making our own 'evacuation plan.' "-- Brad Buchholz, Austin American-Statesman

" The chapters about Matt and the short stories demonstrate O’Connell’s ability to develop sympathetic, true-to-life characters using intriguing details and compelling dialogue. The stories remind us of those times when a brief encounter with a stranger left us wondering about that person’s past. In Evacuation Plan, O’Connell satisfies that curiosity. "-- The Texas Observer

"It was very hard for me to put this book down. It carries us through the deepest meaning in life and most painful, most hopeful memories for a wide range of fascinating characters. Based in a hospice, this book could have easily resorted to cheap sensationalism, or whacked us upside the head with stereotypic melodrama, but instead it was respectful, honest, and tender. The characters will stay with you - you may even recognize some of them within your own life. "-- Award-winning author Carmen Tafolla

"An excellent, thought-provoking diversion from our own inevitable plummet toward the grave, and we highly recommend it to you, the living."-- Wayne Alan Brenner, The Austin Chronicle

"O’Connell has drawn some colourful and believable characters. The material relating to the hospice and terminal care rings true, all the way to reconciliation and forgiving."-- Dr. Roger Woodruff, International Association for Hospice & Palliative Care

"The tales are nicely written, and some are quite compelling; “The Male Nurse,” for one, is a dreamlike reverie."-- Texas Monthly

“Evacuation Plan: A Novel From The Hospice by Joe M. O'Connell is nothing short of remarkable … a novel that walks hand-in-hand with death and yet, somehow, the reader finishes the book feeling inspired to live.” – The Paisano

"A wonderful blend of lives ordinary but with sometimes extraordinary elements. We all share these stories of life in some way, despite moments of harshness or unforgiving pain. There is always a common thread of humanity and ultimately forgiveness to be found, even if it's in the last moment of life."-- Elaine Williams, author of A Journey Well Taken

"Reading Evacuation Plan is akin to unwrapping a series of small perfectly-chosen presents. Both human and humane, The book resembles a modern Spoon River Anthology with its vivid, touching glimpses into the lives of those in and around a hospice."-- Tim McCanlies, screenwriter The Iron Giant, writer/director Secondhand Lions

"In Evacuation Plan Joe O'Connell does for the process of dying what Sherwood Anderson did for middle America in Winesburg, Ohio--he shows us in brief flashes the aching beauty of the grotesque, and shows us how extraordinary small lives and quiet deaths can be."--John Blair, Drue Heinz Literature Prize winning author of American Standard

"Here's a book so rich with stories of the living, so filled with people's bountiful problems, as well as incidents of wry forgiveness, one realizes over and over the circling forces of life's completeness. It's not a sad tale nor a needless feel-good account but a balanced, sometimes comic, affirmation of what is here and what we all know is waiting."-- Carolyn Osborn, award-winning short story writer

"The broken, the hopeful, the frustrated, the clueless, and the forgiving touch one another with words, remembrances, and hands. Inevitably, readers will quietly wonder about their own evacuation plan."-- Will's Texana Monthly

O'Connell's protagonist skillfully navigates under the guise of a writer seeking raw materials for his craft in the stories of the dying, but mines and refines instead the stuff we're all made of. In this finely crafted novel, we come away with much more than the astute observation that many of the best stories begin at the end. But, then again, that notion is also worth a lot.--Jesse Sublett, cancer survivor, rocker and author of Never the Same Again

"Joe O'Connell's Evacuation Plan--this Decameron of the hospice--encompasses a paradox. Death comes for everyone, but death is the only human universal because everyone dies, and witnesses dying, with private, unspeakable shame. Yet there are a few minutes left to speak. As people die, they tell stories which spawn new stories, which remind us that death is agony, a violent struggle, but so is living."-- Debra Monroe, Flannery O'Connor Award winning author of Newfangled and Shambles